If you can't, at least make your management aware of the risks they're facing so that when something horrible happens, you've got a nice paper trail showing that you're not the scapegoat they're looking for.
Parent is 100% bang-on. Years ago, as a well-intentioned, bright (but organizationally naive) systems analyst/engineer, I did not do enough to document systems design risks. This was partly because I was simply too confident in my abilities.
Today, I'm careful to report on certain aspects of system functionality that are key development objectives--and what business risks are tied to those objectives not being met. Sometimes, a business has to make the hard choice of willingly flying by the seat of their pants, but a good consultant or employee is there to make the consequences of all choices clear to the management. It's more than just CYA.
If it's logistically possible, a VPN running over a Verizon, Sprint or AT&T Wireless data service may be what's needed. Perhaps it maintains a real-time connection to the back-end or perhaps it backs up periodically. In any event, it would reduce the "exposure window" of damage, i.e., if this laptop is stolen in the next four hours, I know the data was backed up at least once in the previous four hours.
The cost of wireless data cards and service is plummeting: this may be a good time to consider it.
While it's likely that grammar Nazis have already read this book, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" is still worth mentioning...
When certain key words are found, Google flags your phone to download certain advertisements to say, your background image.
...and also intriguing is that Google engineers may be analyzing the 1-800-GOOG-411 service for popular voice keywords and search topics while mobile.
Areas of possible analysis: --The voice data recorded is being analyzed to train their system to recognize popular search items, i.e., "where's a pizza place?" in a call. The voice recognition training would then be applied to the Google Cell service triggering an uninvasive, but welcomed, advertisement. --The requests being made on 800-GOOG-411 are aggregated into marketing data that shows what's popular to look for on landlines or on the move. If the NPA-NXX is generally for a cell phone, Google can say that X block of numbers during Y time tends to make requests for Z. Add GPS capabilities to that, and you've now got many dimensions to add to a model that determines which ads would be the most successful.
Hello fellas. I came across this site, when searching for information about this computer. With that pricetag, it would be a brilliant surf & chat computer for me.
I'm a swedish student, and I found an article in a larger web-newspaper in sweden and was amazed..
Sadly though, when reading comments all over, at swedish sites, this thing starts to smell very very rotten..
The speculation is about this beeing a scam, in the same way that you've mentioned above.
There's bankrupcy issues, lies at the homepage, weird and incomplete messages from the people behind this "madison" company. The screenshots of the computer, has been found at other manufacturers. Companies, that Madison claim to work with, hasn't heard of the connection..
The things above, has been discovered by many people, at different swedish sites. Even more than that.
The 4-6 week delivery time, sounds perfect to grab as much cash as possible and run.
No-one can find anyone with an example of this computer. People doesn't believe this thing even exist.
I recommend all of you, to wait and see how everything turns out here in sweden, before you buy this. As most swedes do right now.. Wait and see if the first computers arrive at all.
I hope that this isn't a scam. I'd love to buy one. I'd love if the promised "future generation" will arrive.
AT&T/Cingular may be good everywhere else in the US, but their coverage seems troubling in Portland, OR.
Over the last five years, it seems like friends who have AT&T service experience a higher rate of coverage problems (no signal), especially in apartments and certain neighborhoods that are in the core of the Portland Metro area.
I have virtually had no issues with Sprint's network, and Verizon's seems to be quite reliable. I suspect it's in part due to Portland's topography (multipath issues due to hills, etc.), a better Sprint/Verizon network deployment and/or a gap in GSM's ability to perform adequately in our circumstance.
I'd really love to move to GSM (I've already got an unlocked quad-band RAZR I use in Europe), but I just don't want to chance the dicey voice quality.
I believe you are incorrect about high-end amplifiers and speakers being able to reproduce a dog whistle. Assuming a dog whistle is somewhere in the 20000 Hz range (give or take a few KHz), this should be easily reproducible by several amps (i.e., Jeff Rowland) or the Avalon Eidolon Diamond speaker series.
Granted, the reference system I heard was somewhere in the $160K price range (including room treatments), but I must say that it did sound quite beautiful.
I intended to mean wider inventory of IT/PC based products...and that's why I go there. If I'm buying anything from CompUSA, it's because I'm really pressed for time, can't find a comparable item from Circuit Sh*tty or Beast Buy, and don't want to drive to Fry's (depending on traffic in Portland, that trip takes anywhere between 15-45 minutes).
Sure, if I'm ordering lots of stuff, online is a much better option, but there are times when it's roughly the same price to buy locally when shipping is considered. It's also nice to have a place to return things to instead of doing the shipping song-and-dance.
I completely agree. I was a contractor last year at an organization that used Lotus SameTime. I felt it was indispensable for getting concise--but very valuable--questions answered. Picking someone actively logged in and firing a question off was much quicker than calling a list of numbers or shooting off an e-mail (and hope they respond sometime soon).
Many organizations I work in are distributed across buildings on a campus or across several states. I think it's less important for organizations to pay for expensive and disruptive moves to put teams physically together (impossible for interstate teams) and more important to develop alternate means toward accomplishing the same objectives.
Part of it is pure hazing - the medical chiefs had to go through it so the new guys should too...
I completely agree with you: this is tantamount to abuse, pure and simple. And seriously: who wants a surgeon to hold a steel blade to them when they've been up for 22 hours?
Despite the fact that I'm more than qualified to get into a decent medical school, I ended up choosing a path that involves a doctorate-level Family Nurse Practitioner program. And, I'll bet that I can give a new MD a run for the money when I complete it.
...and, my roommate has this phone. It's certainly not bad, but Jobs' keynote speech really did hit the nail on the head on the awkwardness of this and similar phones.
My roommate's general comment: "it's really great, but one of the most difficult things to do with this phone is actually use it as one."
I want to check whether students, as well as my family, can feel my presence through Geminoid.
Sounds like this guy is using The Force to suit his evil purposes.
Re:That's great and all, but...
on
Growing Insulin
·
· Score: 1
It's ironic of thinking that the insurance companies being the "good guys,"
As someone who has now worked as an IT consultant to two insurance companies, I can say that there are things that happen in this business that concern me: unusual/difficult reimbursement and claims adjudication practices, extremely high levels of fraud from patients and doctors in certain parts of the US (cough, California, cough), etc.
Ideally, health insurance companies would be neither the "good guys" or the "bad guys." They would act more as an efficient, low-operational-cost vehicle for spreading risk across a population. It is within the collective best interest for an insurance company to remain solvent, while providing significant benefit to the policyholder.
To the west of the Cascades, there is s fair percentage of liberal thought. To the East of the Cascades, it's pretty much a Dependent Territory of Idaho.
A pretty apt statement, if I've heard one.
Same for Oregon: there's Portland, and then there's the rest of Oregon. Even Salem (a mere 45 miles or so away) is extremely different culturally than Portland. Shit, even Vancouver, WA, just across the river, is quite different culturally. My friend refers to Vancouver as "Vantucky," if you catch my drift. Interestingly enough, Vancouver apparently has a higher per-capita incidence of $1MM+ net-worth-residents than Portland, likely to escape higher taxes.
I've lived in Portland, but commuted extensively to both places, and was quite surprised. I'm not saying folks in those places are evil or anything (maybe a little naive here and there), but definately different.
The only difference between the two, I'd say, is that Eastern Oregon/Washington are probably a bit less Mormon, but that's just conjecture on my part.
I enjoyed parts of your earlier post (noting doctors and such), but this one smacks of raving lunacy. A reminder: writing reams of text does not guarantee a well-reasoned post.
The paragraph I derived this phrase from is dangerously close to having a "begging the question" rhetorical problem: You wouldn't expect a political scientists to be against the political system, any more than you would expect a carpenter to be against wood.
Let's forget that for now. Of greater concern to me is something you noted earlier: "Your job, as a political scientist, is to maintain a faith in the state and political process."
Where you're going with this is preposterous. You're making it sound like all political scientists are "ingrained" with the exact same notions of what "state" and "political process" should be like. If political scientists are anything like philosophers or anthropologists, I'd say that their worlds of ideas are probably bigger than you think.
If you're feeling that bent-out-of-shape about having relatively few political scientists to share your worldview with, I suspect the problem is more with your own faith in your ideology.
Actually, in terms of your comment, I believe the article would be referring to "mass defecations", something MS has also been doing to customers.
Seriously--having spent several years as a Windows sysadmin prior to becoming a IT apps/systems analyst, I thought that it was nebulous for a medium-sized company to need to pay $60-80K just to get access to NDA KnowledgeBase articles.
I'm sure some of you remember the great fun had with needing to keep comments off the Windows for Workgroups workstation name configuration because the Master Browser record was getting too big, and you couldn't see all the machines in your workgroup. We only got access to specific details on that because we had an MS Premier Support account.
Thanks for the mammaries, MS, you big teat. Sheesh.
I'm still waiting for RIM to sue China Unicom over the release of the CrankBerry, a name clearly infringing on far more ubiquitous name CrackBerry.
Bring on the real trademark infringement fight!
Re:Apple is going to make a killing...
on
Going To Boot Camp
·
· Score: 1
To everyone who thinks this is going to be Apple's demise, you are completely wrong. No one buys a Mac for the hardware.
You are completely wrong to say that "no one" buys a Mac for the hardware. I'm proof of that.
The first computer I really connected with was a Mac SE (with "SuperDrive") purchased around 1987. After that, I purchased a PowerBook 100 which served me quite well for several years, and which was sold at five years of age to another person. If anything, this is impressive considering the fact that this wasn't considered one of Apple's more robust laptops (or should I say Sony laptop?).
After that, I didn't feel a burning need to buy another Mac laptop. My employers were providing me with Windows laptops that worked just fine, and why should I spend money on yet another thing prone to breakage and theft?
Having since returned to school (making a shift from IT systems engineering to nursing), I began to long for the "old days" of relatively trouble-free existence of Mac hardware. For example:
* Port doors that don't get ripped off or break in strange manners * Screen brightness/contrast and volume controls that are actually integrated with the OS, rather than having to use an Fn key to muck with them (or figuring out if Windows or the hardware config is the problem when I can't hear anything). * Reliable sleep and hibernate. I have yet to get Windows to reliably return from sleep.
I just need a laptop that can be a reliable workhorse for school. If I can dual-boot it with Windows, even better for those few moments I could really use it.
But ultimately, even if Dell or Compaq sold a laptop that was MacOS compatible, I'd still buy my laptop from Apple. I'm not made of money, but am willing to pay more money for reliability.
(Typing this from my ThinkPad 600x battery destroyer with defective TouchPoint)
Sheezus, enough with the conceit already...
on
Going To Boot Camp
·
· Score: 1, Funny
From Apple's Boot Camp page: Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it'll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.
While the statements are factually correct, I found that the use of the terms "plague" and "1980s" on this page to be too pretentious for my sake.
I mostly use Windows platforms, and am looking forward to buying the first Mac system I've owned in over 11 years.
Do I like and appreciate Mac OS and Apple hardware? Yes.
Do I appreciate the grotesque levels of narcissism on this page? No.
Apple, enough already. If you want some reasons to get over yourself, look at some of the hardware problems you've had with laptops in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can't, at least make your management aware of the risks they're facing so that when something horrible happens, you've got a nice paper trail showing that you're not the scapegoat they're looking for.
Parent is 100% bang-on. Years ago, as a well-intentioned, bright (but organizationally naive) systems analyst/engineer, I did not do enough to document systems design risks. This was partly because I was simply too confident in my abilities.
Today, I'm careful to report on certain aspects of system functionality that are key development objectives--and what business risks are tied to those objectives not being met. Sometimes, a business has to make the hard choice of willingly flying by the seat of their pants, but a good consultant or employee is there to make the consequences of all choices clear to the management. It's more than just CYA.
If it's logistically possible, a VPN running over a Verizon, Sprint or AT&T Wireless data service may be what's needed. Perhaps it maintains a real-time connection to the back-end or perhaps it backs up periodically. In any event, it would reduce the "exposure window" of damage, i.e., if this laptop is stolen in the next four hours, I know the data was backed up at least once in the previous four hours.
The cost of wireless data cards and service is plummeting: this may be a good time to consider it.
NPA = Area Code
NXX = Prefix, i.e., (123) NXX-1234.
While it's likely that grammar Nazis have already read this book, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" is still worth mentioning...
e -Punctuation/dp/1592402038/ref=cm_lm_byauthor_prod _0_0/103-5376028-7903034
http://www.amazon.com/Eats-Shoots-Leaves-Toleranc
When certain key words are found, Google flags your phone to download certain advertisements to say, your background image.
...and also intriguing is that Google engineers may be analyzing the 1-800-GOOG-411 service for popular
voice keywords and search topics while mobile.
Areas of possible analysis:
--The voice data recorded is being analyzed to train their system to recognize popular search items, i.e., "where's a pizza place?" in a call. The voice recognition training would then be applied to the Google Cell service triggering an uninvasive, but welcomed, advertisement.
--The requests being made on 800-GOOG-411 are aggregated into marketing data that shows what's popular to look for on landlines or on the move. If the NPA-NXX is generally for a cell phone, Google can say that X block of numbers during Y time tends to make requests for Z. Add GPS capabilities to that, and you've now got many dimensions to add to a model that determines which ads would be the most successful.
See comments from Engadget:i ty-150-of-linux-laptop-for-the-people
http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/25/medison-celebr
This one looks particularly concerning:
Johan Löfgren @ Jul 25th 2007 12:02PM
Hello fellas. I came across this site, when searching for information about this computer. With that pricetag, it would be a brilliant surf & chat computer for me.
I'm a swedish student, and I found an article in a larger web-newspaper in sweden and was amazed..
Sadly though, when reading comments all over, at swedish sites, this thing starts to smell very very rotten..
The speculation is about this beeing a scam, in the same way that you've mentioned above.
There's bankrupcy issues, lies at the homepage, weird and incomplete messages from the people behind this "madison" company. The screenshots of the computer, has been found at other manufacturers. Companies, that Madison claim to work with, hasn't heard of the connection..
The things above, has been discovered by many people, at different swedish sites. Even more than that.
The 4-6 week delivery time, sounds perfect to grab as much cash as possible and run.
No-one can find anyone with an example of this computer. People doesn't believe this thing even exist.
I recommend all of you, to wait and see how everything turns out here in sweden, before you buy this. As most swedes do right now.. Wait and see if the first computers arrive at all.
I hope that this isn't a scam. I'd love to buy one. I'd love if the promised "future generation" will arrive.
But this thing doesn't feel safe.
Cincearly
-Johan Löfgren. Orebro, Sweden
Good tip! My friends have used a variety of _new_ phones with Cingular in Portland (Motorola, Blackberry, etc.) with intermittent problems.
That said, for $14, it's worth a shot.
AT&T/Cingular may be good everywhere else in the US, but their coverage seems troubling in Portland, OR.
Over the last five years, it seems like friends who have AT&T service experience a higher rate of coverage problems (no signal), especially in apartments and certain neighborhoods that are in the core of the Portland Metro area.
I have virtually had no issues with Sprint's network, and Verizon's seems to be quite reliable. I suspect it's in part due to Portland's topography (multipath issues due to hills, etc.), a better Sprint/Verizon network deployment and/or a gap in GSM's ability to perform adequately in our circumstance.
I'd really love to move to GSM (I've already got an unlocked quad-band RAZR I use in Europe), but I just don't want to chance the dicey voice quality.
I believe you are incorrect about high-end amplifiers and speakers being able to reproduce a dog whistle. Assuming a dog whistle is somewhere in the 20000 Hz range (give or take a few KHz), this should be easily reproducible by several amps (i.e., Jeff Rowland) or the Avalon Eidolon Diamond speaker series.
Granted, the reference system I heard was somewhere in the $160K price range (including room treatments), but I must say that it did sound quite beautiful.
I intended to mean wider inventory of IT/PC based products ...and that's why I go there. If I'm buying anything from CompUSA, it's because I'm really pressed for time, can't find a comparable item from Circuit Sh*tty or Beast Buy, and don't want to drive to Fry's (depending on traffic in Portland, that trip takes anywhere between 15-45 minutes).
Sure, if I'm ordering lots of stuff, online is a much better option, but there are times when it's roughly the same price to buy locally when shipping is considered. It's also nice to have a place to return things to instead of doing the shipping song-and-dance.
I completely agree. I was a contractor last year at an organization that used Lotus SameTime. I felt it was indispensable for getting concise--but very valuable--questions answered. Picking someone actively logged in and firing a question off was much quicker than calling a list of numbers or shooting off an e-mail (and hope they respond sometime soon).
Many organizations I work in are distributed across buildings on a campus or across several states. I think it's less important for organizations to pay for expensive and disruptive moves to put teams physically together (impossible for interstate teams) and more important to develop alternate means toward accomplishing the same objectives.
Opening up practice in New Hampshire by chance?
:-)
Sorry--most likely, it will be in Portland, OR. As for that yacht, well, maybe someday I'll have a small one
Part of it is pure hazing - the medical chiefs had to go through it so the new guys should too...
I completely agree with you: this is tantamount to abuse, pure and simple. And seriously: who wants a surgeon to hold a steel blade to them when they've been up for 22 hours?
Despite the fact that I'm more than qualified to get into a decent medical school, I ended up choosing a path that involves a doctorate-level Family Nurse Practitioner program. And, I'll bet that I can give a new MD a run for the money when I complete it.
...and, my roommate has this phone. It's certainly not bad, but Jobs' keynote speech really did hit the nail on the head on the awkwardness of this and similar phones.
My roommate's general comment: "it's really great, but one of the most difficult things to do with this phone is actually use it as one."
...they should just install the Windows Genuine Advantage code on the paintings. (ducks)
I want to check whether students, as well as my family, can feel my presence through Geminoid.
Sounds like this guy is using The Force to suit his evil purposes.
It's ironic of thinking that the insurance companies being the "good guys,"
As someone who has now worked as an IT consultant to two insurance companies, I can say that there are things that happen in this business that concern me: unusual/difficult reimbursement and claims adjudication practices, extremely high levels of fraud from patients and doctors in certain parts of the US (cough, California, cough), etc.
Ideally, health insurance companies would be neither the "good guys" or the "bad guys." They would act more as an efficient, low-operational-cost vehicle for spreading risk across a population. It is within the collective best interest for an insurance company to remain solvent, while providing significant benefit to the policyholder.
Consider how you might be mod'ed if you reply truthfully to your significant other's question of "Does this make me look fat?"
If she had mod points, it would probably be "Score: -1, Celibate"
To the west of the Cascades, there is s fair percentage of liberal thought. To the East of the Cascades, it's pretty much a Dependent Territory of Idaho.
A pretty apt statement, if I've heard one.
Same for Oregon: there's Portland, and then there's the rest of Oregon. Even Salem (a mere 45 miles or so away) is extremely different culturally than Portland. Shit, even Vancouver, WA, just across the river, is quite different culturally. My friend refers to Vancouver as "Vantucky," if you catch my drift. Interestingly enough, Vancouver apparently has a higher per-capita incidence of $1MM+ net-worth-residents than Portland, likely to escape higher taxes.
I've lived in Portland, but commuted extensively to both places, and was quite surprised. I'm not saying folks in those places are evil or anything (maybe a little naive here and there), but definately different.
The only difference between the two, I'd say, is that Eastern Oregon/Washington are probably a bit less Mormon, but that's just conjecture on my part.
I enjoyed parts of your earlier post (noting doctors and such), but this one smacks of raving lunacy. A reminder: writing reams of text does not guarantee a well-reasoned post.
The paragraph I derived this phrase from is dangerously close to having a "begging the question" rhetorical problem:
You wouldn't expect a political scientists to be against the political system, any more than you would expect a carpenter to be against wood.
Let's forget that for now. Of greater concern to me is something you noted earlier:
"Your job, as a political scientist, is to maintain a faith in the state and political process."
Where you're going with this is preposterous. You're making it sound like all political scientists are "ingrained" with the exact same notions of what "state" and "political process" should be like. If political scientists are anything like philosophers or anthropologists, I'd say that their worlds of ideas are probably bigger than you think.
If you're feeling that bent-out-of-shape about having relatively few political scientists to share your worldview with, I suspect the problem is more with your own faith in your ideology.
"Raaaaaaaaaiiiinnnnneeeeeeerrrrrrr Beeeeeeeeerrrrrr."
:-)
(Whoops, sorry--wrong ad
Actually, in terms of your comment, I believe the article would be referring to "mass defecations", something MS has also been doing to customers.
Seriously--having spent several years as a Windows sysadmin prior to becoming a IT apps/systems analyst, I thought that it was nebulous for a medium-sized company to need to pay $60-80K just to get access to NDA KnowledgeBase articles.
I'm sure some of you remember the great fun had with needing to keep comments off the Windows for Workgroups workstation name configuration because the Master Browser record was getting too big, and you couldn't see all the machines in your workgroup. We only got access to specific details on that because we had an MS Premier Support account.
Thanks for the mammaries, MS, you big teat. Sheesh.
My thoughts exactly. Bolivian Marching Powder or Peruvian Go Dust, anyone?
I'm still waiting for RIM to sue China Unicom over the release of the CrankBerry, a name clearly infringing on far more ubiquitous name CrackBerry.
Bring on the real trademark infringement fight!
To everyone who thinks this is going to be Apple's demise, you are completely wrong. No one buys a Mac for the hardware.
You are completely wrong to say that "no one" buys a Mac for the hardware. I'm proof of that.
The first computer I really connected with was a Mac SE (with "SuperDrive") purchased around 1987. After that, I purchased a PowerBook 100 which served me quite well for several years, and which was sold at five years of age to another person. If anything, this is impressive considering the fact that this wasn't considered one of Apple's more robust laptops (or should I say Sony laptop?).
After that, I didn't feel a burning need to buy another Mac laptop. My employers were providing me with Windows laptops that worked just fine, and why should I spend money on yet another thing prone to breakage and theft?
Having since returned to school (making a shift from IT systems engineering to nursing), I began to long for the "old days" of relatively trouble-free existence of Mac hardware. For example:
* Port doors that don't get ripped off or break in strange manners
* Screen brightness/contrast and volume controls that are actually integrated with the OS, rather than having to use an Fn key to muck with them (or figuring out if Windows or the hardware config is the problem when I can't hear anything).
* Reliable sleep and hibernate. I have yet to get Windows to reliably return from sleep.
I just need a laptop that can be a reliable workhorse for school. If I can dual-boot it with Windows, even better for those few moments I could really use it.
But ultimately, even if Dell or Compaq sold a laptop that was MacOS compatible, I'd still buy my laptop from Apple. I'm not made of money, but am willing to pay more money for reliability.
(Typing this from my ThinkPad 600x battery destroyer with defective TouchPoint)
From Apple's Boot Camp page:
Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it'll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.
While the statements are factually correct, I found that the use of the terms "plague" and "1980s" on this page to be too pretentious for my sake.
I mostly use Windows platforms, and am looking forward to buying the first Mac system I've owned in over 11 years.
Do I like and appreciate Mac OS and Apple hardware? Yes.
Do I appreciate the grotesque levels of narcissism on this page? No.
Apple, enough already. If you want some reasons to get over yourself, look at some of the hardware problems you've had with laptops in the past.